#writing

The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing. ↗

A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. ↗

— Charles Péguy

#writing #writer

Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace. ↗

— Louisa May Alcott

#novel

Burn worldly love, rub the ashes and make ink of it, make the heart the pen, the intellect the writer, write that which has no end or limit. ↗

— Guru Nanak

#love

The main question to a novel is -- did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not -- story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing. ↗

— Sydney Smith

#enjoyment #novels #pleasure #writing #love

He had let me know time after time that he was a thinking man, a man of intellect and wit. Yet one unintended hungry look into my eyes and he betrayed each of his words he had carefully spoken to me. I knew it in that instant. He was a viscerally driven man. And one day, he would possess me. ↗

— Coco J. Ginger

#intellect #jamie-weise #love #love-story #possess

...it seems to us that the readers who want fiction to be like life are considerably outnumbered by those who would like life to be like fiction. ↗

— Sarah Caudwell

#humor

Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#nature #travel-writing #humor

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#writing #humor

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage. ↗